Remote preparation of an atomic quantum memory

In this paper, we present the first experimental demonstration of the remote preparation of an internal state of a single 87Rb atom. Our approach uses atom-photon entanglement as the interface between the two quantum systems and allows to distantly prepare an arbitrary quantum state of a distant atomic qubit. For this purpose we use the quantum teleportation protocol, where the desired state is first prepared on the photon and, after Bell state measurement, transferred to the atom.